Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 has been superseded by
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny). Some of these
installation images may no longer be available, or may no longer work, and
you are recommended to install lenny instead.

Installing Debian GNU/Linux etch-and-a-half

Overview

The etch-and-a-half release is essentially just the most recent
point release for etch, but with a more recent kernel (version 2.6.24).
The main purpose of this release is to allow installation of etch
on systems not supported by the 2.6.18 kernel that is used in regular
etch installs.

For further details about scope, purpose and limitations of the
etch-and-a-half release, see the
Release Notes.

Installing

For new installations of etch-and-a-half the current release of
Debian Installer for lenny is used, with minor
changes for compatibility with etch.

Because the current lenny installer is an RC release, it
may have some errata you would not expect in a stable release.
See the errata section at the bottom of this
page for details.

The lenny installer includes a number of changes from the
etch installer. See the release announcements for the
beta1,
beta2,
RC1 and
RC2
releases of the installer for an overview of changes.

This includes changes that affect preseeding (automated
installations). See the appendix on preseeding in the Installation
Guide for lenny (linked below) for correct preseeding options.

The following installation options are available to install Debian GNU/Linux
etch-and-a-half.

netinst CD image (generally 135-175 MB)

Only available for selected architectures.

Will automatically install etch-and-a-half.

Will automatically install the 2.6.24 kernel.

Can optionally be used in combination with images from the
current full CD/DVD set for etch.
After the installation of the base system, the installer will ask
if additional CDs should be scanned; at that point insert CD1 or
DVD1, or the KDE or Xfce CDs.

The current etch-and-a-half installation images based on
Debian Installer Lenny RC1 use a newer kernel (2.6.26) than the
version that was included in the etch-and-a-half release
and is installed for the target system (2.6.24). In some cases this
can mean that hardware which is supported during the installation
does not work after the reboot into the installed system because
support for it was added after the 2.6.24 version.

If any of the hardware in your system requires firmware to be loaded
with the device driver, the installer may ask if it should load the
firmware from a removable medium, such as a floppy disk or USB stick.
General information about loading firmware during an installation can
be found in the Installation Guide (see Documentation below).

For the netinst and businesscard CD images, MD5SUMS and
SHA1SUMS files are available from the same directory as the
images.

There are two reasons the netinst image is only available for selected
architectures. First, a lot of architectures don't really have new
hardware that is not supported by the 2.6.18 kernel. Second, some
architectures are most commonly installed using netboot, making the CD
image unnecessary.

Documentation

If you read only one document before installing, read our
Installation Howto, a quick
walkthrough of the installation process. Other useful documentation includes:

Errata

This is a list of known problems in the installer shipped with
Debian GNU/Linux etch-and-a-half. If you have experienced a problem
installing Debian and do not see your problem listed here, please send us an
installation report
describing the problem or
check the wiki
for other known problems.